UN CSW: the way to empower women is to use CEDAW Article 5, not the CSW

The most
effective international mechanism to promote gender equality and women’s
empowerment is not the cumbersome UN CSW, it’s CEDAW, and it’s time to use it to
make governments accountable.

At the 60th
Session of the annual UN
Commission on the Status of Women (CSW60) this month, 8,000 women’s NGOS,
representing feminist and women’s movements around the world, had the golden
opportunity to rally around this year’s priority theme: “Women’s Empowerment
and its link to Sustainable Development”.

But will
this year’s assembly bear fruit? Will governments do what they promised to do
last Friday, the 25th March?

Whilst
government delegates in the UN building burnt the midnight oil arguing through
80 hours of negotiations to agree the “final conclusions”, in an
atmosphere often tense with battles over language on such controversial topics
such as reproductive
and sexual health, the definition of the family, LGBT
rights, domestic and sexual
violence, and issues of culture and sovereignty, we, in our various
shabbier locations across 1st avenue, networked and talked to each
other, bringing the voices of the poorest, most invisible and vulnerable women
and girls to our “parallel NGO events”. But who heard us?

Our meetings,
which so vividly described the realities of the often desperate needs and
crucial roles of the world’s very poorest women and girls, were barely visited
by the policy makers across the road in the UN building who are charged with
the responsibility of implementing the Agreed Conclusions they have fought over
with such intensity.

The Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs) is one of the most ambitious UN projects since the
adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and Goal No. 5 on
gender equality opens the door for women and girls to raise such issues as
violence against women, and their sexual and reproductive rights. But the real
challenge is to ensure that women and girls have an equal decision-making role
in the 16 other goals, for clearly we women have important contributions to
make towards ending poverty and hunger, ensuring health, education and decent
work for all, and most of all for ending inequalities, addressing climate
change and building a sustainable peace.

The promise
in the SDGs is to “Leave No One
Behind”. This is a beautiful phrase,
but words are not enough, and rarely have we NGOs seen the commitments made by
Member States in decades of Agreed
Conclusions implemented on the ground.

Sphere Within Sphere by Italian
sculptor Arnaldo Comodoro.

“Implementation! Implementation! Implementation!” Cried the indefatigable deputy CEO of UN
Women, at the NGO consultation prior to the official CSW opening. Likewise,
Ambassador Antonio Patriota, the Brazilian CSW Chair, stressed the vital roles
of the women’s organisations in every country as the key monitors of progress
in fulfilling these agreed obligations, and as the agents for filling the
yawning gaps in data and identifying those categories of women and girls – such
as the widows – who are so often forgotten and fall through all safety nets.

Indeed, the
scope and ambition of this 2030 Agenda
(A/RES/70/11)
poses huge data challenges. Existing sources of data are insufficient, and
without filling this gap there can be no effective monitoring of its gender
dimensions.

For example, although we have much anecdotal
evidence of the huge increase in the numbers of widows and wives of the missing
due to armed conflict, revolutions, sectarian strife, HIV and AIDS and harmful
traditional practices such as child marriage to far older men, there are no
reliable statistics, or even adequate qualitative information to describe their
life-styles, coping strategies, support systems, or experience of violence
within the family – which is a vital precondition for evaluating any progress
in improving their status.

The role of
men and boys in promoting gender equality is well referenced in the Agreed
Conclusions, and there is a wealth of “best practice” around, the question of how
to actually
harness their potential for this important task that could be so
transformational in changing conventional patriarchal attitudes is not spelt
out. Patriarchal attitudes block, so
often, women’s access to justice, even where new modern laws have been enacted
to comply with obligations under international agreements such as the Beijing Platform for
Action and the CEDAW.

Bandana
Rana, the Nepali feminist who won the Women of Distinction Award, who also
spoke at the NGO consultation, prioritised the task of “changing the mind set
of men and boys in the home”, and she looked forward to the day when “every
home rejoices at the birth of a girl”. How to get this transformation on the
road?

As a UK barrister
and lifelong human rights activist (now in my eighties), who has attended no
less than nineteen annual CSW meetings, here is what I would like to see
happen, and as soon as possible.

I want to see as many Member States, who have
ratified the CEDAW (Committee
of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against
Women) to band together to collectively ask the CEDAW to consider a General
Recommendation (GR) on their Article 5: Stereotyping
and Cultural Prejudices.

Article 5 requires
States Parties to “take all appropriate
measures to modify social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women,
with a view to achieving the elimination of prejudices and customary and all
other practices which are based on the idea of inferiority or the superiority
of either of the sexes or on stereotyped roles for men and women”.

For me, the
most effective international mechanism to promote gender equality and women’s
empowerment, and make Governments accountable for their omissions to protect
their women citizens from discrimination and abuse is not the cumbersome
bureaucratic anti-NGO CSW, but the CEDAW.

CEDAW now needs – pushed and persuaded by the
best of its Member States – to enhance the importance of Article 5, and use its
wording to interrogate States Parties at their 4 yearly reporting sessions,
asking them what means they are using to change the attitudes of men and boys
at all levels of society, from the top echelons to the village, in the informal
as well as formal education structures, in the work place, in the army, in
trade unions, political parties, and among religious and traditional leaders.

CEDAW could
engage the NGO community in providing them with examples of best practice that
have succeeded in altering mind sets, starting in the family, so that little
boys are taught to respect their mothers and their sisters, and see girls and
women and equal partners in the development of their communities and society
generally.

In our
struggle for the dignity, respect and human
rights of widows, of whom there are now so many facing unacceptable
discrimination, abuse, poverty and violence, often barred, whatever the
constitution and law says about equality, to inherit and own land, access
education, training, credit, or employment. Furthermore, these women and girls are
often victims of life threatening and degrading mourning and burial rites, it
is the traditional attitudes that must be changed, and it can be done if there
is the political will. All
widows must be able to live in dignity, their roles as sole heads of households
supported, freed of the stigma and “inauspiciousness” so common to their
status.

CEDAW can
“name and shame” those countries that are found to have done nothing to
implement Article 5.

Those that
can provide the details and evaluation of their projects to alter those
attitudes that block women’s empowerment will see their reputation enhanced and
their successful programmes highlighted, publicised and adapted, providing that
support for the CSW60 Agreed Conclusions they so badly need if the 2015-30 Agenda
for the SDGs is to be achieved.

Such a CEDAW
initiative would be a powerful driver of implementation of the CSW60 Agreed Conclusions,
and also help empower those women’s NGOs that will be the effective evaluators
of progress in the coming years.

This article is part of oD 50.50’s series covering key debates at this year’s UN Commission on the Status of Women.

About the author

Margaret Owen is the Director of Widows for Peace through Democracy. She is the Patron of Peace in Kurdistan, a UK barrister and an international
women’s human rights activist. Follow her on twitter @electionmargie

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